Humpback Whales of Alaska’s Inside Passage (2007)

12/06/20: A photo safari in search of Alaska's Humpback Whales // click to open (or close) the description
In 2007, we had joined a 6days whale watching tour prior to the private round trip from Anchorage described here. The most commonly seen whale in Alaska is the humpback.  From April to September coastal Alaska serves as feeding grounds for a population of 10,000 humpback whales that breed in the warm waters of Hawaii during the winter and migrate to the north in spring again.  Perhaps the highest concentration of that species, over 500 whales, is found in Southeast Alaska, especially in the Inside Passage by then.

We started from Alaska’s capital Juneau on our small vessel  “MS Valkyrie” and cruised along the network of passages and  fjords, i.e  the Frederick Sound, Seymour Channel and Tracy Arm in search of the whales.The main routes, stops and landmarks are indicated in the map below.

We weren’t fortunate to see the amazing “bubble net feeding”, though, when several humpbacks work together in trapping and concentrating the fish with bubble streams from their blowholes while other whales explode from the sea with mouths yawning wide to scoop up the prey.
We also didn’t meet other species of whales, such as Gray Whales or Orcas on this tour, that sometimes can be seen in the Inside Passage, too.

Nevertheless, it was a very good photo trip. We encountered numerous humpback whales, some close to the ship and could also watch breath-taking breaches several times. The landscape was nice, too.

Back to Juneau we visited the Mendenhall Glacier, located around 20km from the city before taking the plane to Anchorage to get our RV for the roundtrip to the inner parts of Alaska and Yukon Territory (see the corresponding description and gallery).

Photography:  I used the 300mm/ f2.8 IS USM and 600mm/f4.0 IS USM (optionally with the 1,4x II Extender) on  my EOS-1 D Mark III,  EOS 1-D Mark II and  EOS-1 Ds Mark II cameras for shooting the whales. The scenery mostly was captured with the 28-70mm/f2.8  USM and 70-200mm/f2.8 IS USM zoom lenses on the EOS-1 Ds Mark II.

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